Robert's story - A Startups CEO perspective on how to cooperate with FabSpace

Robert Heinecke, CEO of Breeze Technologies, became aware of FabSpace 2.0 Darmstadt thanks to his colleague Haris Sefo, Head of Science at Breeze. Haris heard about the latest FabSpace Startup Week in early spring 2017. After some months of remote conversation, the idea was born to create a hackathon in a joint cooperation. “We liked the idea from the beginning. The inclusion of satellite data aligns perfectly with the vision of Breeze Technologies to provide hyperlocal air quality and climate data for every place on earth. We leveraged the hackathon to test integration possibilities with the freely available satellite data into our platform”, Robert summarizes.

While FabSpace engaged additional third party institutions like Count+Care GmbH and the City of Darmstadt as cooperation partners and sponsors, Breeze focused on providing sensor data for the upcoming event. “The planning was very much in line with our mission and we had a great time before, during and after the event”, Haris concludes. Especially the cooperation with Count+Care was a fruitful experience for Breeze and showed the potential of the Open Innovation process. This was not intended to happen upfront but nevertheless we are very happy about it. Together the consortium prepared a lot of materials, like landing pages, flyers and posters for the hackathon, prepared a nice event venue and organised a special price for the best solution. At the end they achieved a great user experience. To sum it up for Breeze: The FabSpace 2.0 experience was just amazing and it showed to us that Open Innovation works.